Can you believe they've come this far by now? Once known as OpenBeOS, Haiku today announced the release of the fourth alpha for Haiku R1. It seems like only yesterday when BeOS died and OpenBeOS rose form its ashes, generating a new hope among the legions of avid BeOS fans. Now, almost twelve years later, we've hit the fourth alpha.

The C++ was actually a blessing and a curse. It tied Be to a very specific compiler for a very long time. It was hard to expand the API without a lot of planning or creation of second versions of the classes (they seem to have been doing this for the BeIA project as there's a second namespace with different classes in the Dev kit I've used.) Adding methods to existing classes was costly as they reserved only a number of "slots". Using them up would cause a lot of issues.

The API being multi-threaded was cool, but it forced a lot of uncomfortable synchronisation on to the developer. There was no middle ground - you either adapted or your app sucked. It had the potential to make really simple operations very complex.